The North American and Israeli scholars who founded Genocide Studies in the 1980s and 1990s also insisted on genocide’s Holocaust archetype. These scholars successfully resisted the “conceptual stretching” of genocide to include political criteria in its definition. Domestically, they advocated an apolitical “toleration” pedagogy as genocide’s antidote. The US victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s sidelined the lively critique of the US national security state and gave rise to a new age of interventions. Vietnam-induced doubts were left behind as “the indispensable nation” became the world’s hyper-power. Although the founders of Comparative Genocide Studies were liberals who opposed the Vietnam War, they eagerly adopted the role of academic handmaiden to US global aspirations: the field anointed the US as the benign force to police the non-West in the form of humanitarian interventions to prevent genocide, other “atrocity crimes,” and to wage “war on terror.”

Imperial formations of one kind or another have been the political form in which most humans have lived for thousands of years. Permanent security practices enabled imperial expansion and consolidation through the ages. To tease out its function since the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas in sixteenth century, it is necessary to distinguish between empires of exploitation and settler colonies. The language of transgression developed to simultaneously conceal and expose permanent security in the process of state formation and originary accumulation: first by justifying settler colonial warfare against indigenous resistance, and second by condemning the illiberal permanent security practices of imperial rivals, whether the Iberian powers in the early modern period or the fascist and communist ones in the twentieth century. Liberal permanent security in the form of settler colonialism normalized its modality of settlement, state-formation, and originary accumulation as a theodicy, a story of civilizational progress that benefitted humanity.

To understand how and why Germans imagined the most radical vision of illiberal permanent security, this chapter suggests that the “political imaginary” offers historians a fruitful way to integrate human agency with historical processes. It shows how an imperialist political imaginary functioned in sections of the German political class between the 1890s and 1930s. Then it examines how Adolf Hitler utilized this imaginary for his own purposes: his raiding of the imperial archive to construct permanent security for Germans. Fearing Germany’s destruction due to its catastrophic territorial and biopolitical losses after the First World War, he concluded that exploitation and genocide had attended European imperial expansion over the centuries. Jews figured as the ultimate enemy in his and Nazi thinking. We will also see that, as a project of imperial conquest, the Nazi empire entailed a consciously radical combination of imperial conquest and settler colonialism.